The Woolco Record Department at Argyle Mall, East London, Ontario, Canada, June 1966, from the London Free Press’ Pictures From the Past series. (Click on Photo to Enlarge)

What a trip it was to see this photo of one of my old childhood record-hunting locales 40 years after it was snapped!

As a fan of history—especially cultural history from global to local—I always look forward to one of my favourite features in the London Free Press: Pictures From the Past, a weekly installment reprinting photos from the paper’s archives spanning decades.

PFTP ran a photo last June of particular interest to me of the Woolco Record Department at Argyle Mall in 1966. Having grown up in Huron Heights in the ‘60 and ‘70s, Argyle Mall was just a few minutes drive up Clarke Road. Regular trips there with both my parents and other family members means that everything about the place is burned into my memory from youth. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE TO READERS: Owing to the March 2015 closure of OpenSalon.com — which was my primary publishing platform, where I initiated this blog and concert series project, and was where most of my pieces were accessed — I need to plug up a few blog-holes (i.e., post-up here a clutch of early Open Salon blog entries that I never transferred to this cyberabode). This post is one of those orphaned Ghosts of Blogging Past that needs a re-debut.

In advance of my Best of 2015 recap (appearing shortly), here is my first year-end music entry from February 2011: 5×5: My “Best Of” Musical Round-Up for 2010. While I am republishing the list as I saw it at that time, I’ve reconsidered some of my choices in the interim. Here’s how I would rank 2010 now from a 2016 perspective:Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re a tunehead lifer, farming your musical terrain with a polycultural approach to sonic agriculture, it’s a reality — indeed a necessity — that certain strains of artists/genres/stylistic obsessions inevitably drop out of and then later resurface in my listening crop rotations. But, as I’ve previously noted, not all seasons’ harvests continue to yield again down through the years. While some evergreen produce re-seed and return stronger than ever, others wither and dine on the vine. Read the rest of this entry »

I first encountered Blondie in the pages of NYC-based Rock Scene magazine in the summer of 1975. It was a single page feature, appearing less than a year after the group’s formation and first shows at CBGBs. Blondie had begun by opening for the also-nascent Ramones who had similarly been popping up in recent Rock Scene issues. Indeed, most of the mid-70s NYC underground first came to my attention via RS.

Retrospectively, I now see what an odd, prescient publication it was on a few fronts.

I first heard of Belle & Sebastian shortly after their mid-‘90s emergence but didn’t get to actually hear them until just after the turn of this century. A younger friend of ours from that time was over one night when Donovan came on a CD compilation that we were listening to. “Who is this?,” he asked. “It sounds like Belle & Sebastian.” Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another Ottawa Jazz Festival: more great music intersecting with frustrations. In other words, business as usual.

This year’s J Fest appeared as a terrific proposition with a stellar line-up anchored by its biggest star, Ms. Aretha Franklin, along with the currently touring collaboration between ex-Talking Head David Byrne and the fabaroony St. Vincent aka Annie Clark. Sweetness! Not only that but Willie Nelson, The Bad Plus, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Mavis Staples, and a few other options. Read the rest of this entry »

ABOUT My Life — In Concert! … *****NOTE: Blog-wide image repairs are underway (images linked over to my opensalon.com page disappeared when the site closed). Eventually all images will be restored. Thanks for your visual patience. YOURS, THE MANAGEMENT**** Greetings! I am a terminal music fan who will be writing about my life as a concertgoer from 1975 to the present. It’s about the music but also about the lives lived along with it, with each gig recollected as a whole experience rather than simply being a description of the performance: a mix of memoir, concert review, music history, and philosophical musing. I will also sometimes publish off-theme entries, both music and non-music-related. ****** I’m on Facebook (www.facebook.com/mylifeinconcert), have a work-in-progess YouTube channel, VATV (www.youtube.com/user/mylifeinconcert). Since 2010, my primary publishing platform and audience existed over on Open Salon but that online venue sadly closed in March 2015. Welcome here to all those who were following me and commenting over there. ****** Thanks to Cublet for artwork assistance.